Quote: Martin Prechtel

“Only those who take their chances with life and live integrally without a big safety net have known the kind of deep felt loss and grief that end up being able to praise the best. They are the poets driven by life’s grief. Those are the ones by whom we most need to be blessed, because their ability to praise is a form of contagious wealth in and of itself; their blessings are powerful beyond some simple liturgical metaphor. Their magic is ratified by a diploma in the trials of reality as negotiated by the bravery that is love on a daily basis.”

- Martín Prechtel, The Smell of Rain on Dust: Grief and Praise, 2015,

North Atlantic Books, Berkeley, Ca

Quote: Robert Bringhurst

The mind is old snow, new snow, brooding rain.
The mind is lichen crust and stone.
Pebbles and sticks are the fountains of wisdom.

Go into the hills and remain there forever.
Wise as a snowflake that lives
for ten minutes, wise as a stone

that is young at three million years,
let the trees make your gestures,
the creeks and the gutters your prayers.

Pass the note of yourself to the river
to read to the hills. Let the wind and the leaves
speak your thoughts in their language.

Many or few: any number will do. This
is the worlds, and the world is one – either one –
and neither and both of your eyes.

And your face is its face. And the eyes in your face
are the eyes you have seen,
seeing you, in the faces of others.

- From Dogen, in The Book of Silences, by Robert Bringhurst, Selected Poems, Copper Canyon Press, 2011

THE VIRUS OF PROGRESS #7

[Many early researchers]… lived in an era when the driving force of events seemed to be great leaders of European descent…when white societies appeared to be overwhelming nonwhite societies everywhere. Throughout all of the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century, nationalism was ascendant, and historians identified history with nations, rather than with cultures, religions or ways of life.

- Charles C. Mann, 1491

THE VIRUS OF PROGRESS #6

Before Columbus… [many researches believed that] …both the people and the land had no real history. Stated so baldly, this notion – that the indigenous peoples of the Americas floated changelessly through the millennia until 1492 – may seem ludicrous. But flaws in perspective often appear obvious only after they are pointed out [and can take]…decades to rectify.

• Charles C. Mann, 1491

THE VIRUS OF PROGRESS #5

It is always easy for those living in the present to feel superior to those who lived in the past.

- Charles C. Mann, 1491

THE VIRUS OF PROGRESS #4

[A] story may contain many meanings and levels of interpretation.

- F. David Peat, Blackfoot Physcis

THE VIRUS OF PROGRESS #3

Each group of people on Turtle Island has its own account of its history, origins, and relationship to the land… it is only within Western society that our Aristotelian logic demands a single, unambiguous account of an origin. Some nations, such as the Haida and Blackfoot, speak of having occupied their land forever, while others, such as the Ojibwaj, tell of a great migration to their present land. In all cases, however, it is made clear that the land itself is sacred, that it was created for the People, that they have a special relationship to it, and that there are obligations that must periodically be renewed.

For hundreds and thousands of years these stories have been passed on. They are the heart of Indigenous science and metaphysics. They are what bind a people together and relate them to the powers and energies of the universe. They are what give meaning to the ceremonies of renewal. Within these stories can be found the origins of time, space, and causality. Just as the human body is kept healthy and coherent by its immune system, a field of active meaning that permeates the body, so, too, a people and the land they care for are sustained by the relationships and renewals contained within these maps and stories… Western science is one of those stories that we repeat to ourselves in order to validate our society.

- F. David Peat, Blackfoot Physics

THE VIRUS OF PROGRESS #2

I believe the verdict of most “hard-nosed” scientists would be that, while Indigenous metaphysics and philosophy is certainly fascinating and, to the extent that brings people close to nature, attractive; nevertheless, it should not be called a science. This is the inevitable conclusion within a worldview whose values are dominated by the need for progress, development, improvement, evolution, and the linear unfolding of time. Within such a world it stands to reason that things evolve, that automobile engines become more efficient, that new computers are faster, and that some societies are more highly developed than others.

Our Western concept of nature is based on an evolutionary model. Left to the natural forces around them, things will “progress,” getting better and better. Going along with this worldview is the need, when faced with alternatives, to decide which one is “better” than the others. It goes without saying that when it comes to other people’s cultures we are generally the ones who are doing the measuring, and are supplying the yardstick as well!

- F. David Peat, Blackfoot Physics

QUOTE: Robin Wall Kimmerer

“The names we use for rocks and other beings depends on our perspective, whether we are speaking from the inside or the outside of the circle. The name on our lips reveals the knowledge we have of each other, hence the sweet secret names we have for the ones we love…. Outside the circle, scientific names for mosses (or other natural beings, CT) may suffice, but within the circle, what do they call themselves?”

- Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss, A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses

THE VIRUS OF PROGRESS #1

My suggestion is that the West’s desire for progress, growth and increase has brought about the very diseases that have become its scourge … I suggest that sickness that sweeps through a population has its origin not so much in viruses but in ideas. A virus is information, a segment of DNA that enters into the cells of a healthy body and instructs them to operate in a different way…the conditions under which human immune systems become debilitated are the direct result of social conditions. Disease is a manifestation of human thought because it is ideas, worldviews, and beliefs that create the conditions in which a society can be riddled with disease, strife and poverty or can continue in health and harmony.

- F. David Peat, Blackfoot Physics

QUOTE: BILL SAA

As the reality shows, it perhaps required the lives of at least 700 humans, hundreds more infected, including the deaths of key medical doctors and hospital administrators including some of Liberia's and Sierra Leone's key profile doctors, 2 other American medical practitioners who are said to be infected and at the brink of the their lives, and Patrick Sawyer, the Liberian who flew to Nigeria with the disease and left high alert panic in that region…In retrospect, did it require all these alerts before we came to our senses? Where is the trust between our leaders and the citizens gone? And why is it so? 

- Bill Saa, everyday gandhis and WANEP (West Africa Network for Peacebuilding)

PEACE

“It's only when you see a mosquito landing on your testicles that you realize there is always a way to solve problems without using violence.”

- Mahatma Gandhi

LIVING WITH INTEGRITY

“A gift comes with responsibility.”

- Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss, A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses

IN MEMORY OF ROBIN WILLIAMS

"Live stories worth telling! Stop hitting the snooze button. Try not to squander your life on meaningless, multi-tasking bullshit."

- Annie Lamott (writer), friend of Robin Williams

OUR RELATIONSHIP WITH NATURE - #8

“To hear the unembodied call of a place, that numinous voice, one has to wait for it to speak through the harmony of its features – the soughing of the wind across it, its upward reach against a clear night sky, its fragrance after a rain. One must wait for the moment when the thin – the hill, the tarn, the lunette, the kiss tank, the caliche flat, the bajada – ceases to be a thing and becomes something that knows we are there.”

- Barry Lopez, in Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape

OUR RELATIONSHIP WITH NATURE - #7

“If there is magic in this world, it is contained in water.”

- Wm. Kloefkorn, quoted by Luis Alberto Urrea in Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape

OUR RELATIONSHIP WITH NATURE - #6

“…Middle grounds are sandbars or mudflats found in the middle of a tidal channel; water flows on either side of them. They characteristically occur near the entrance or exit of a constricted passage… The politician infallibly steers for the metaphoric middle ground, th4e shifting shallows created by current events. Not so the honest sailor.”

- Franklin Burroughs in Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape

OUR RELATIONSHIP WITH NATURE - #1

“The names we use for rocks and other beings depends on our perspective, whether we are speaking from the inside or the outside of the circle. The name on our lips reveals the knowledge we have of each other, hence the sweet secret names we have for the ones we love…. Outside the circle, scientific names for mosses (or other natural beings, CT) may suffice, but within the circle, what do they call themselves?”

- Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss, A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses

OUR RELATIONSHIP WITH NATURE - #5

“Pondering on the facts of gravity and the fluidity of water shows us that the golden rule speaks to a condition of absolute interdependency and obligation. People who live on rivers – or, in fact, anywhere in a watershed – might rephrase the rule in this way: do unto those downstream as you would have those upstream do unto you.”

-Quoted by Donna Seaman in Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape

OUR RELATIONSHIP WITH NATURE - #4

“In indigenous ways of knowing, all beings are recognized as non-human persons, and all have their own names. It is a sign of respect to call a being by its name, and a sign of disrespect to ignore. Words and names are the ways we humans build relationship, not only with each other, but also with plants.”

- Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss, A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses